Posts

The Greatest Retail Empire in American History — Built, Neglected, and Looted

Image
How Sears went from selling houses out of a catalog to five stores and a website — and how one hedge fund manager got rich watching it burn. Part One: The Company That Invented American Shopping Before Amazon. Before Walmart. Before the mall. There was Sears. In 1886, a Minnesota railroad station agent named Richard Sears bought a crate of watches a local jeweler didn’t want. He sold them to other station agents along the rail line. That was the spark. He moved to Chicago, hired a watchmaker named Alvah Roebuck, and by 1893 Sears, Roebuck and Company was open for business. The big idea wasn’t a store. It was a catalog. In an era when print media reigned supreme, Sears dominated the rural retail market through its massive catalog. Titled the Book of Bargains and later The Great Price Maker, the famous Sears catalog expanded in the 1890s from featuring watches and jewelry to including everything from buggies and bicycles to sporting goods and sewing machines. It educated millions of shop...
Post a Comment
Read more

We Just Got the Green Light. Tiny Homes Are Coming to Las Vegas.

Image
​ Last Wednesday, Las Vegas City Council voted unanimously to approve our project — Sunridge on Searles. Fifty tiny homes. 2.25 acres. A vacant lot turned into a real affordable housing community. Three years in the making. A lot of obstacles. Worth every one of them. Sunridge on Searles is a $6 million development built using Boxabl materials. Boxabl is a Las Vegas–based manufacturer building factory-produced, foldable modular homes. Their CEO Paolo Tiramani put it simply: the company exists to solve the housing crisis through technology and scale. That’s exactly why we partnered with them. Each unit is about 360 square feet and will rent for $1,000 a month — utilities included. The median asking rent in the Las Vegas metro right now is $1,423, still running 17.6% above pre-COVID levels. We’re coming in 30% below market. That’s the point. The units go on a pad, on grade, no steps. Permanent. Foundation-set. Accessible — designed with seniors in mind from the start. No wheels. No ambig...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE CORPORATE SKI RESORTS ARE FOLDING. THE INDEPENDENTS ARE STILL OPEN.

Image
Spring 2026 is making it obvious who actually cares about skiing. It’s early April in New England. The snow is still deep. The days are long. The corn is perfect. And the biggest ski resorts in the region are shutting down. Meanwhile, the little guys? Still spinning lifts. This isn’t a weather story. It’s a business model story. And if you ski in New England, you need to pay attention. THE SCOREBOARD Killington, Vermont, independent, privately owned,  markets itself as the East’s longest season, and it’s earning that title again this spring, with no announced closing date and passes sold through the end of the season. Black Mountain in Jackson, New Hampshire, claims it will keep at least one run open until June 1. June. In New Hampshire. That’s not a typo. Now look at the corporate side. Sunday River, owned by Boyne Resorts closes April 19, 2026. Not a snow shortage. Not a force majeure. A scheduled corporate shutdown, weekend-only operations in the final stretch, with terrain shri...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Real Estate Becomes a National Security Asset: What the Florida Spy Story Means for Developers

Image
​ By Daniel Kaufman | March 2026 I spend a lot of time thinking about what drives real estate demand, population shifts, employment anchors, infrastructure investment, interest rate cycles. But I’ll admit, foreign espionage operations aren’t usually in my underwriting model. They probably should be. Vanity Fair recently published a sweeping investigation into what it’s calling “Spylandia” a stretch of Florida’s Space Coast that has quietly become one of the most active corridors for Chinese and Russian intelligence operations in the United States. The piece details drone overflights of Kennedy Space Center, recruitment of SpaceX engineers at local bars, and the part that caught my attention as a developer — strategic real estate acquisitions near Patrick Space Force Base. Let me sit with that for a second. Real estate as an intelligence platform. Houses and rental units purchased specifically to surveil one of the most sensitive military and commercial space installations on the planet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Prosperity Isn’t Where the Media Says It Is (And It’s Not Where They Say It Isn’t)

Image
​ By Daniel Kaufman  If you listen to the national media long enough, you would think America’s major legacy cities are collapsing, everyone is fleeing the coasts, and the only smart real estate investment is somewhere in the Sunbelt. As a real estate developer and investor who actually studies long-term fundamentals instead of headlines, I can tell you the reality is far more nuanced — and far more interesting. A new framework called the Geography of Prosperity Index, created by Bradley Schurman and Jaymes Cloninger, attempts to measure something most rankings miss: long-term civic viability, not just short-term economics. That distinction matters. Too much real estate analysis today is driven by lagging indicators like last year’s population migration numbers, temporary interest rate impacts, or political narratives. Serious investors look at durability — not noise. And the results of this study challenge a lot of the simplistic narratives dominating real estate c...
Post a Comment
Read more